Honoring Our Elders

I first met Connie Goldman when she was a reporter for National Public Radio,
covering the “aging beat,” as she described it. Actually, she had been the arts
reporter before that, and her growing interest in artists and performers growing
older had led her to a deepening interest in aging. At first she didn’t get a
lot of support for her “aging beat.” But she persisted, and she has become a
prominent journalistic voice, one of the most creative in our country, a
national treasure, as the Japanese might put it.

When Connie first turned up in my office at the Brookdale Center on
Aging in New York City, I immediately realized that I had found an ally:
that is, someone who truly believed that later life could be a season of
growth and positive change. I chuckle now when I think how young
both she and I were at that time (30 years ago!). Yet, perhaps in proof
of the “continuity theory of aging,” I haven’t changed my positive view
and neither has she.

In the years since then, we’re both older (I’m even on Medicare myself ),
but, as always, Connie is 15 years older than me and she remains a
pioneer leading the path before me. But not only me. Connie is, and
has been, a guide for all of us. In a professional group on aging and
marketing in which we both participate (The Society), we have a nickname
for Connie: “Mother Wisdom.” The name could not be more apt.

Connie would certainly refuse any claim to wisdom, probably describing
herself as a merely an interviewer, someone who asks questions
and who listens carefully. That’s all true. But it was also true for the very
paradigm of wisdom, Socrates, who got in lots of trouble by asking
questions.

Connie is not by nature a troublemaker but she is engaged in “disturbing
the peace” because she asks deep, sometimes disturbing questions
about aging. As she herself has advanced further into the territory, her questions only get deeper — and sometimes more
disturbing.

An earlier radio series she did was entitled “I’m Too Busy to Talk,” and
at that time she envisaged a side of positive aging which reflects
activity, curiosity, and growth in new directions. All quite valid, and
admirable. But there is more, and as she herself deepened the quest,
she has become a one-woman testament to “conscious aging,” which
is something different from either “successful aging” (good health and
social ties) or “productive aging” (contributing to the world around us).
Connie’s own aging has, without doubt, been “successful” and “productive.”
But that’s not why I treasure her or why the interviews she has
done have proved so influential. In recent years, Connie has probed the
“hidden rewards of caregiving” (challenging the conventional thinking
on this topic) and now she’s exploring what it means to be one receiving
care. In this deepening quest, she has paralleled with Ram Dass
as he has done, moving from writing a book titled How Can I Help? to
asking the (provocative) question: How can you help me? Ram Dass’s
question is not at all egocentric. Quite the opposite. It’s an attempt to
grapple with caregiving and the challenge of dependency. So it is with
explorers like Ram Dass and Connie Goldman. They ask questions that
challenge conventional thinking and make us reflect on our own path
through later life.

The questions she asks, and the answers that she gets,
have brought us all a deeper consciousness of what age can mean. In his Letters
to a Young Poet, Rilke wrote, “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then
gradually without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
This is the trajectory of Mother Wisdom herself. The Psalmist tells us to
“Number our days.” My wish is that we should number, and treasure, the days of
her life as Connie Goldman helps us all find a path with a heart.